The Limey
Directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Starring Terence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzman and Peter Fonda.
For those of you out there who don’t know what ‘limey’ is I can inform you that it is slang for a British sailor, so-named because of the enforced consumption of lime juice in the navy to combat the scourge of scurvy. However, in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey the term refers to British ex-convict Wilson (marvelously played by Terence Stamp from Priscilla fame), who has traveled to Los Angeles to avenge his daughter Jenny’s untimely death. Wilson soon realises that Jenny’s love affair with record producer Terry Valentine (a very sleazy but somehow still likable Peter Fonda) is intimately linked to her fatal ‘car accident’ and he sets out to pursue Valentine, not just to kill him but to make him realise what he has done.
Soderbergh calls the movie “a very simple revenge film with a lot of ’60s baggage” and the casting of Stamp and Fonda, who both burst onto the film screen in the 1960s, obviously helps to emphasize this historical aspect. In quite a unique fashion, footage from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow from 1967 (where Stamp portrays a young thief named, not so coincidentally, Wilson) has been integrated during Wilson’s periodic moments of introspection to show a younger Wilson and create understanding for his feelings of loss.
Although The Limey has some brilliant performances, and in certain instances resembles a lesser version of the excellent Memento, it is still a forgettable film. The women are hardly more than cardboard cut-outs and the camera work is pedestrian. The Limey was made in 1999 before Erin Brockovich and Traffic, which earned Soderbergh truck loads of Oscar nominations last year. Why it has taken so long to appear on Australian screens I don’t know, but I could have easily continued to live without it.
Sol
